Kickstarter Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

My interview experience at Kickstarter was really good. The recruiter was great – helpful, friendly, quick to reply, and not pushy at all. I liked the take-home assignment a lot, way better than typical leetcode problems. The onsite part had a few rounds of behavioral interviews with different people from the company. Everyone I spoke with was thoughtful and engaged. I ended up taking another job offer, but the whole process gave me a good feeling about Kickstarter.

So, before we even get to the interview part, just be aware that they will ghost you. Completely. I thought I did great in the interview and was really looking forward to hearing back. The manager told me, "I'll let you know our decision next week." I waited until the following Friday and tried to reach out, but heard nothing. Then I tried again on Wednesday, and still nothing. They clearly don't value your time. They don't care that you might take time off work to interview with them. They don't care that you spend time studying and thinking about how to answer potential questions. Once you're done with the interviews, it's unlikely you'll hear back. You won't get any feedback, and you won't even know why they decided not to move forward with you. It's just complete silence from their end. The process involved a Zoom call with the team manager, a pair programming session where we fixed bugs and worked on a couple of features, and then about 6 hours of interviews with different people, including a director. There was also an architecture design session.

I had a phone screen, then a technical phone call with the CTO, followed by a take-home project. After that, a developer reviewed my project. The interviews themselves went fine, but the recruiters were pretty disorganized. It took them 3-4 weeks to tell me what was happening after the last interview, and I had to email them to find out. They said they didn't offer me the job because they needed someone more senior.